April 10, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
05:51
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| And his church wanted to have communion. | |
| And you did, and nobody was arrested or anything, but you were still regarded as having violated the law. | |
| Is that correct? | |
| Yes. | |
| Right. | |
| So here are the questions that obviously people from the other side would say. | |
| And before I ask it, I want to clarify, would you like to have services every Sunday, only the first Sundays when you have communion, or only Palm Sunday? | |
| Whatever we would want to do, the bottom line is we would do it by CDC standards. | |
| So if they lay this out, whatever applies to anything else that's considered essential, we'll do the same. | |
| But don't relegate us to nonessential. | |
| So to facilitate a church service, we can do that via live stream. | |
| But to have communion from one loaf together as a fellowship, we had to facilitate it in such... | |
| I mean, communion took over two hours for us when it normally takes 15 minutes. | |
| So we wanted to accommodate all the rules of the CDC. But the issue is not about being safe. | |
| The issue was... | |
| You're not essential. | |
| Right, I understand. | |
| So in light of that, and I do believe religion should be considered essential. | |
| So do the founders. | |
| Right, well that's why I believe it. | |
| So let me just clarify though, this would mean that theoretically thousands of churches with Millions of people, ultimately, would be able, under CDC guidelines, if they all obeyed by it, and I don't know who would supervise that, would be functioning. | |
| That's okay with you? | |
| It is. | |
| And another thing to consider, too, Dennis, is in our county, we have 854,000 people. | |
| We've had 243 reported cases of coronavirus as of yesterday with six deaths. | |
| That represents less than one one-thousandth of a percent of our total population, but yet that's enough to shut down all churches and not even give us any remote access to community, even if we abide by CDC standards. | |
| And what happens when the flu comes through? | |
| What happens next? | |
| Well, look, these are questions I've been posing the whole time. | |
| You know, it's one thing in Queens and it's another thing in Thousand Oaks. | |
| The idea that we have the exact same policies everywhere in the country strikes me as irrational. | |
| So what has been the reaction to you? | |
| I am sure you get a lot of hate mail. | |
| Do you get a lot of support? | |
| Is it 50-50? | |
| What is your read? | |
| I don't participate on social media with the exception of an Instagram account. | |
| You don't get email? | |
| I get email. | |
| Okay, but it's a private address? | |
| You don't have a public email address? | |
| Yeah, some folks got through, but the joy of it is I had a city council email address, and of course they shut that down the minute I resigned, so most people probably set their dissatisfaction with that email address. | |
| But folks have, you know, the support has been overwhelming. | |
| And we typically do about 400 communion servings on an average Sunday. | |
| We were probably close to 700. We had people drive, we had a drive-through for folks that didn't want to come in, but we would hand them the communion elements on like a long pole with a communion tray, six feet distance that they would receive through the opening of the window of their car. | |
| We had 70 cars go through. | |
| We had countless people around the community asking us to deliver communion, which we did. | |
| And, you know, there's some really creative pastors out there. | |
| There's a wonderful pastor in Oxnard who is doing kind of like a drive-in movie theater. | |
| He's having them all come in and tune into the same radio station. | |
| I think pastors are trying to figure out the best way to do this. | |
| So we're trying to honor Caesar while preeminently honoring Christ. | |
| All right, we have a call here from Thousand Oaks, your city. | |
| Jay, you're on with Pastor Rob McCoy. | |
| Oh, hi, Dennis and Rob. | |
| Thanks for taking my call. | |
| I understand everything you're saying, Pastor, and I do live in Thousand Oaks, and I think, unfortunately, it's become an issue of safety versus the separation of church and state. | |
| As opposed to defining whether religion is essential. | |
| I mean, I do believe that religion is essential. | |
| I happen to work in one of these industries that's been deemed essential, a real estate industry. | |
| And like many of my colleagues, I'm a musician who supports open houses and other events. | |
| I'm not comfortable with it, and it's a very difficult line to draw. | |
| And I think that unfortunately the takeaway is regardless of the proper precautions that are being taken and the numbers you mentioned, people are afraid and unfortunately they've been made to be afraid. | |
| And the situation we have here in Thousand Oaks and Ventura County certainly does not mirror. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, that's, of course, the pastor's argument. |
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